Guerrilla journalism

Want to understand how Bush manipulated his way into power and now fights an unjust war? Or who officially spies on citizens for the White House? Or how much oil is really left and where is it? Greg Palast's 'Armed Madhouse' unearths the ugly truth about America today.
By Michael McCaughan

Greg Palast came to mainstream prominence with his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy in which he dissected the vote fraud at the heart of George W Bush's election victory in 2000. Palast is a business journalist with an uncanny ability to find and copy secret documents and make them public. What sets him apart from his peers is his radical, uncompromising perspective which combines the throwaway humour of Michael Moore with the meticulous fact-checking of Noam Chomsky.

In addition Palast is an on-the-ground reporter who seems as comfortable in the corridors of the corporate power as he is visiting an indigenous village in Ecuador. The downside is an ego the size of a whale as Palast plays the roving superhero, thwarting evil and setting the world to rights.

In a masterful display of facts, figures and interviews Palast lays bare the vote fraud which secured a second Bush victory in 2004 and reveals why the Democrats rolled over and accepted it. There is no fight in the Democrats because they feed at the same trough as the Republican pigs: an expanding barrel of swindled state cash.

'The Night of the Uncounted' chapter analyses the disappearance of three million votes – votes which were cast but never counted. With the skill of a forensic anthropologist Palast tracks the fate of these votes which, if validated, would have changed the course of the election. The beauty of this scheme is that the voter never knows their vote didn't count, so there is no post-election insurrection.

When the US electoral authority dismissed over one million "spoiled votes" in 2004 they were talking about votes that bad machines failed to register because the X was too light to read. Then there were the uncounted absentee ballots, about half a million. Throw in the voters barred from voting through the infamous "felony" lists which eliminated thousands of voters – usually black democrats – in closely-contested districts and you have a mechanism for delivering the White House to the Republicans for the foreseeable future.

Palast uncovered a similar pattern of perfidy in Florida 2000 where democrat Al Gore should have received about 77,000 more votes in a contest that was decided by a mere 537 ballots. In a world where permanent war and corporate fascism seem to be the only future under the Bush dynasty, that false margin of victory acquires real significance. In addition, the current Lebanon conflict demonstrates that when the world's super power ignores international law and declares its right to strike pre-emptively wherever it chooses, tinpot aggressors like Israel can follow suit without fear of sanction. By the same logic, when an election is brazenly stolen in a country held up as the highest example of democratic practice in the world the green light is on for elections to be stolen everywhere.

Mexico's recent presidential election was similar to the US election in that an unusually high number of votes were spoiled in a 40-million vote cliffhanger decided by 250,000 ballots. The official result has yet to be announced due to the ongoing investigation into irregularities but Bush ally Felipe Calderon has already declared victory and received his congratulatory phone call from the White House.

Palast travels to Venezuela where he finds an electronic voting system that actually works, combining a touch-screen ballot with a paper receipt. The technology was developed, oh irony, in Florida, but Jeb Bush has shown no enthusiasm for replacing worn machines in poor neighbourhoods which have a problem recording black votes. The vote purge is all the more galling when one reads how Palast and a team of investigators warned officials about the potential for rigging the election back in 2002 but were ignored. 'Lynching by laptop' is how Palast describes the process.

Palast keeps a close eye on Choicepoint, a private company which collects data on citizens around the world, amassing billions of files that would be illegal if the FBI had possession of them. Because it is a private company it operates with both impunity and lucrative government contracts, effectively becoming a private KGB. US Congress outsourced the spy market to Choicepoint under the Patriot Act but, rather than track dodgy individuals with terror links, it is tracking black democrats in Florida. In 2000, Choicepoint "identified" 94,000 "felons" who were refused permission to vote. However, at least 91,000 of these "felons" were innocent legal voters who lost their ballot and suffered the indignity of a public challenge at the polling booth. In 2005 Choicepoint mistakenly sold credit card records to a gang of identity thieves. Palast traces the Choicepoint executives back to the interlocked world of high finance and political power, joining the dots meet between Cheney, Bush and the billionaires who bankroll them.

Just as global warming is triggering climate change, the imminent end of oil is triggering price hikes and a general panic over the future. Wrong!

According to Palast's well-researched theory, there has never been more oil available. It hasn't peaked and major deposits lie untapped. It is rarely mentioned that as the price of oil rises, so too does the potential to extract more. This curious paradox is explained by the cost of refining inaccessible crude deposits which only become viable when the price per barrel has risen to a certain level. The good news is that if oil prices remain as high as they are now, Venezuela and Iraq will eventually have the highest oil reserves in the world, displacing US ally Saudi Arabia. The bad news is that the US will have found a pretext to invade Venezuela by then and Iraq will remain a client state.

Palast describes himself as a war correspondent on the frontline of corporate globalisation and his dispatches are as important in understanding the mechanics of that war as Robert Fisk's reports are in witnessing the pain of our "unpeople" condemned to perpetual grief, fear and injustice.p